This is the part of the story when

You know those days where the rest of the world is effortlessly sunny and productive and there you are, in a shadowed corner of your bedroom, wishing it was raining and windy and dark so the outsides could just begin to try and match your insides? This morning it was like that.

I just realized the date on the calendar - May first - and realized that one year ago exactly was a Friday, if I remember correctly. It was a weekend, at the very least, and there was a big loud noisy smelly thrilling party and everything from that semester was just accumulating and it felt significant. I knew who my friends were, who I loved, where and how I wanted to move forward. And this year, this May first...I woke up with a storm cloud over me. Here it's just days, here I know once I get off this computer that both makes and breaks my life and step outside, it will be better. It's Montpellier, and the sun will be out, and beautiful hipster teenagers will be roaming the streets, and old men will be on bicycles, and on and on until I name every typical Montpellieran into oblivion.

Last night, I was eating dinner with my host mom Michèle, her friend Sophie, and the other girl here who is staying for 3 months, Mariko (I shouldn't call Mariko a girl, I guess - she is twenty-eight, lives in Tokyo and has a husband. She works at a clothes store and is always adorably dressed and cheerful) and it was fun. I actually spoke more than a few words, and Michèle commented on how much better I was speaking, and I was happy. And it's true, I feel like I can speak to people without thinking too hard about the translation.

Yesterday I took my last examen final - hooray! - and I saw words I was writing down that I didn't know in January, or even later than that, and it felt good. The french university workload is laughable compared to overachieving American standards, but I like to think I learned a lot regardless. At the very least, I can fake a French-person-speaking-English accent quite well.

sunday, sunday

the rain today further underlines the fact that there is nothing to do on this day of the week in montpellier. stores are closed, and while normally i would take this chance to go for a meandering walk or a laze on the esplanade, the inclement weather renders this impossible.

it is quite nice to listen to, though, and makes the world outside my ceiling-window (i would say sun roof, but I don't know) an impressionist painting.

Senior year? ...Excuse me?

Since I constantly obsess over my future (yeah, even in France), of course I was up at the bright and early hour of 7AM Eastern Standard Time (a cushy 1PM here in Montpellier) to register for classes that I meticulously obsessed over in the hours before I went to sleep for the past two weeks or so.

Thanks to my most excellent senior-status registration time, I just signed up for Readings in French, The French-Speaking World Outside Europe, Early French Literature, Humanities II, and just for kicks, Folk Music in America. It's weird since I'm technically not taking any English classes for the first time in my undergraduate career (career is such an odd word, I feel, to describe the things you do in college, but anyway..). But fear not! I will be TA-ing a 200-level creative writing class, and I'm super excited about that.

Which reminds me, I really haven't been doing as much writing as I've wanted to this semester, which just shows how hard it is to motivate myself without a real deadline in mind. But then again, it's a beautiful day and there are always free benches at the park. And I can put off my homework just a little longer..

My face feels warm

I awkwardly asked some people to take our photo, haha.

Surpassed all of my expectations this morning and woke up, got dressed, and met everyone else into to voyage to the beach. One hour's worth of public transportation (tram & bus, easily paid for by my ultra-cool monthly pass) and we were there, in gorgeous Palavas, and the shore stretched out for miles.

Call me low maintenance, but a solid four hours of hanging on the shore of the Mediterranean Sea with some American (& one Spanish!) students and French groceries and I'm set. Every (99.9% to be exact) second guess, every uncomfortable moment...today, it's okay. And now I remember why I picked the south of France.

How is France real.

So for a few weeks the professors of all the university-led courses were on strike (though I take courses at the university, it's through the international student department, so mine went on as usual), then the students blockaded the doors to all the buildings (seriously, I have not seen a single one untouched, and there are a whole lot of doors) with chairs, desks, benches, etc. and plastered the campus with posters that read, "Paul Valéry en grève!" and today, when I thought there wasn't anything more they could do, I tried to get on campus for my politics class and the entryway was closed. The whole campus was just closed off to the outside world.

Supposedly, the night before there was rioting with the students (or homeless people? I head that too, I don't know) and the president of the school ordered the campus closed for the day, and for the blockade to end. So, supposedly on Monday things will resume as usual...not that anything has been usual around here.

So after finding a makeshift classroom in a building down the road, learning about things like the Dreyfus Affair and Emile Zola and the French print media, I celebrated the ridiculous French university system by sitting in a park for a few hours, with some friends, some cheese, and a baguette. Ahh, la vie française.

Toujours, un grève

This is what most of campus looks like: piles of chairs and desks all over the place. Most of them are blocking doors to all the buildings; this one here is more symbolic, I guess. These are the front gates to the school but these desks here aren't really keeping anyone out. All the main university courses are cancelled for the time being, but since all of my classes are through the International Students department, they're still going on. But there's still small interruptions - my professors had to find a new room for our classes, and I couldn't get back my politics exam because my professor couldn't get to his office. Yikes. Some of my friends haven't had classes for weeks, and are wondering if they'll still get credit if the strike continues. I just couldn't imagine something like this happening at Geneseo, but I guess its pretty normal here.

A class I had last Tuesday was cancelled and a friend's class was on strike. So where do you go when you have a sudden petits vacances thrust upon you?

The Meditteranean Sea, bien sûr. Just a 5 euro train ride away. Sometimes I wonder how this life is possible.

Revelations

I traveled three thousand miles to fall in love with a city. Since I came back to Montpellier from vacation I have felt overwhelmed in the greatest way, and I realize why I chose this strange medium-ish city over Paris, or over any other program I could have snuck my way into. I wanted to know France, and while I won't pretend to be an expert in an entire culture or country after two months of living in it, I feel the start. My thinking and speaking muddle between English and French, leaving meaning somewhere in the middle, suspended like an insect in ancient amber (yeah, like the kind you saw in Jurassic Park).

The apartment buildings, the trains running on time a few blocks from my bedroom, the dog-shit covered streets, always being asked if I have a spare cigarette, taking the afternoon slowly in with a café au lait and making a mustache from the bubbly milk. For once, I have not wondered if there is something greater out there, something more I should be seeing. Right now, I will have to remind myself years down the road, I was a part of it. It exists. I can touch it. The moon shines through the skylight every night and I will be the first to admit that not every day is perfect, not every day is inspirational, but I am here and I am finding the experience very, very formidable.

[but there is home, too, the united states. geneseo. and this summer, an empty vessel which needs to be filled by this better self, The Self That Went to France. there are people I need to still wrap my arms around. it's not just the city - i need them, too.]

The university campus is barricaded by its own students as of today. I'm not entirely sure what the strike is about to explain it well, but it seems French students are very vocal and very ready to make their opinions known to the President, to protect their educational system. I can't imagine what would happen if Geneseo students mobilized and boycotted class for a day, but here it hardly makes news: France has a culture of grèves, after all. I guess we'll have to wait and see if this makes a difference or not. My classes are proceeding as usual, since I chose to take all of mine through the International Relations department (e.g. French professors but all American students. I was really nervous about my level of French two months ago), and those are still proceeding as normal, so I'm not personally affected. But it's really interesting to witness, in any case.

I don't have classes on Wednesdays anyway (seriously, my schedule here is way, way, laughably less jam-packed than at Geneseo) so today I wrote some cover letters for summer internships and went to see Milk, with Sean Penn. It was amazing, seriously breathtaking. It's interesting to watch films with the English soundtrack and French subtitles, because you can see how they chose to use certain words and phrases. And I learned things! Thanks to Milk, when you want to say "Don't hang up," on the phone to someone, it's "Ne quittez pas." Now you know.

Sentimentality towards [a definition of] home

When I was growing up in Oyster Bay, I considered home the place you loved just enough to say goodbye. I considered sunny front porches, small high schools, Memorial Day parades and pajamas-inside-out snow day rituals fine, for a small life, for a life where high school was easy and everything felt right already. Leaving was never a question (even though it was more leaving, with a lowercase l, because you always come back to find out you're not a part of this place anymore but you haven't missed much), an college gave me an open road and some grand image of what I could become: like so many other freshmen awkwardly forming friendships and throwing around their ideas of the future that fall, I envisioned important careers, incredible eye-opening people, and the endless late-night spontaneous happy moments that would dot the next four years of my life. And even though I did choose a college with even tinier, almost less expansive demographics than my sleepy hometown, I found those important people, unearthed those magical quiet moments you find in a library or a newspaper office or a walk in the dead of winter and strung them like pearls. Geneseo was the first place where I had rooms to decorate all by myself, a schedule and social circle and a calendar of events tailored to my liking, and through sophomore and junior year I realized home wasn't a place to escape from, it wasn't a place separate from real life - it was here under my feet, waiting patiently for me to notice.

And has it followed me to France, I wonder? After a whirlwind February break (Paris, Amsterdam, London, and a 48-hour intestinal bug all in a week) it felt really, really nice to throw myself down on a chair in Montpellier's airport to wait for the bus to the tram station and be someplace both familliar and still exciting. I won't be tearing up my return plane ticket and asking my parents to ship my things to my 34000 address (The french consulate, my family, my wallet, etc. probably wouldn't support this decision anyway - but that crepe-maker in Paris who suggested I live with him would be totally pumped) but there is no way I will ever, ever forget this place.

Chai Tea and Talkin' French

Yesterday I went to Book in Bar, an English-language bookstore in Montpellier where they have English-French conversation exchange nights every two weeks. I was a little nervous to go, and incredibly tired from a three-hour politics class in the morning and celebrating two friends' birthdays the night before, but I'm so glad I did!

The bookstore is adorable, a worn chair of a building: it's hidden on an older, pedestrian-only street and the inside smells like tea and used books. There are a few tables scattered about; books in titles of every category spill out of shelves, begging to be leafed through. The French-English conversation was loose and casual - mostly adults and a few American students I knew from class, switching (mostly) seamlessly between the two languages. I chatted with a French 27-year-old woman named Natalie for a while, she was nice! I was just excited to actually be talking with a French person outside of my apartment; all my legitimate conversations up until now had been with my host mom and my American friends (who I try to speak French with - somtimes! But it's difficult to always do that). When the store closed and the group separated, everyone was smiling, content, happily wishing everyone else une bonne soiree.

On top of chatting with really lovely people for two hours, I drank chai tea served in a really adorable teapot. Needless to say, I'll be coming back.

Smelled like spring again

1. I saw these firemen (pompiers) on strike today at the Place de la Comedie, which is Montpellier's main pedestrian square. France has strikes a lot, so I guess these guys were feeling relaxed about it: I guess they figured their truck (grève means strike) spoke for itself, so they took a couple of cafe tables & chairs to just soak up the day.

2. I felt put-together-ish today, so I took a picture to commemmorate. Also, it was sunny for the first time in four days, thank god, which meant I could ditch my yellow coat (not going to lie, it was starting to get to a permanently-damp, wet-dog-smelling status) and stroll the streets exactly as pictured. I didn't have class today, so I went to the train station to book some travel for my break in two weeks, and then to take advantage of the very last of the soldes (think Black Friday stretched out for a month) to build up my chic French wardrobe. So yeah, not really the most intellectually stimulating day, but I did read some of The Adventures of TinTin to take in a little french. The only thing that has stuck so far is the phrase "Mille sabords!" which I think is an old-fashioned, nicer way of saying "Merde!"

3. This is a photo from the Mare Nostrum aquarium of Montpellier. I went this Saturday with two friends and it was really good! There were penguins, and jellyfish, and fish, and coral, and I just love aquariums, and how dark and calm they feel.

Une grasse matinée

'Bathing Girls Galveston' Galveston, TX 1922
A picture I saw today in Montpellier at a free photo exhibit!

In french, une grasse matinée is literally translated into "a fatty morning" - the kind where you linger under the covers longer, eat breakfast slower, rushing nothing, meandering through thoughts and actions until you find the motivation necessary to continue the day. My school schedule - Wednesdays free, three out of the four other days I don't have to leave the apartment until 11:00 at the earliest - affords me many fatty mornings spent sipping coffee and reading my host mom's collection of TinTin comics (so I feel authentically French, natch). And I kind of feel bad for not being such a go-getter all the time, but its nice like this.

Today I loafed around for a little in bed, on the computer, trying to figure out potential travel plans for the nine days I have off in February. I started with a couple inexpensive travel websites (Ryanair.com, Voyages-sncf.com, EasyJet.com) and a myriad of different itinerary options and red tape to figure out. I came out an hour later with a general idea of my trajectory and a reassuring feeling that I could do whatever needed to be done.

Because it's overwhelming at first. When I curled up in bed in this strange apartment with people I didn't know, tired from my day of air and train travel, a small brief wish flashed into my head to find the next return flight to New York, run back to my own familiar bed, and admit defeat: I was not ready for this. And on the first day of classes, when nothing made sense and it felt like nothing would get done, I wished I was part of the group whose home school took care of everything for them - flight times, housing arrangements, weekend excursions, classes, etc.

Looking back with the loads of wisdom and experience two weeks here has brought me, I am now strangely grateful I had to sit through those several uncomfortable hours where a song to the tune of "What the hell am I doing here?" played over and over in my head, because I know I did it by myself. I was originally going for some big motivational lesson to be learned here, but I'll just leave it at that.

While I was out walking today, avoiding my homework for tomorrow (which I still haven't done yet, some things never change), I walked past a free panoramic photograph exhibit and went in. It was really nice and pretty extensive; a nice cultural surprise for a sunday.

Cours compliquees

I rode this tram for the first time yesterday! The first of many, many times. I have to take this lovely light-rail each time I go to school, which is a couple miles away from where I live. I bought the abonnement pour jeunes, basically a monthly pass for students, yesterday with a girl I met at the university and I feel super official now, like I'm really here, really part of the city.

Speaking of school...oof. Yesterday, our orientation, was kinda super confusing. The system to enroll in classes really makes zero sense to me, but now that I've mulled it over for 24 hours it seems to make a little more sense. Basically, to find your courses, you have to walk around to the different departments and stare intensely at this list of courses offered, making sure that they're actually offered this semester and they're for your year. You write a bunch of stuff down and eventually figure out a schedule and start going to said classes, and eventually - like a month later, I think - you register for the final exams so the school knows what you're doing. That could actually all be incorrect, but hopefully I finally kinda know what I'm talking about.

Thus, I couldn't find any classes I wanted for Tuesday (and I'll happily admit it - most of the courses I plan to take are les cours R.I., or courses through international relations adapted for American students) so today I walked around some streets in Montpellier, bought a panini and some fabulous boots (everyone here has fabulous boots! and scarves! and leather jackets).